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Switching from Windows7... here is what I am looking for

I am not a Linux newbie per se. I have played with various distros over the decades but never actually found a compelling reason to switch from Windows. Now I have a compelling reason, it's called Windows 10.

I am looking for a Linux distro that is small enough for older machines (including some really old 32-bit IBM ThinkPad workhorses) but still capable to run newer, better hardware, as my desktop has a 6th-gen core i7 and 16GB RAM.

It's got to be XFCE as DE.

It must be possible to run the whole show from a USB stick as a live system with persistence and also as a frugal install from a HD (again with persistence). Being able to snapshot a running system into a new live ISO would be great.

Ideally I want a bare-bones system with all the drivers, DE etc but no heavy apps, ie no LibreOffice, no vlc, no audio player, no fancy editor, no photo editor). I have already software for these things running under Windows and most of them are either available for Linux (Scite, XNviewMP, Palemoon...) or do run in Wine (IrfanView etc).

I am not afraid to get my hands dirty with admin stuff. In fact I will spend a lot of my time in a terminal window as I am not the point-and-click type.

I have looked into Porteus and MX17 so far. Both are almost perfect... my biggest gripe is the number of apps already installed.

The Linux distro scene being what it is, I can never hope to find the perfect distro on my own, so anyone with an idea, a pointer, please come forward! Thanks.

The Linux distro scene being what it is, I can never hope to find the perfect distro on my own, so anyone with an idea, a pointer, please come forward! Thanks.

Gentoo, it is DIY distro. It will be exactly what you want. If it works well you get the credits, if it does not what you want you are to blame. For instance, I have Kodi frontend running using only 1.9 GB of storage space.

Respectfully... Sarlac II
~~
The moving clock K' appears to K to run slow by the factor (1-v^2/c^2)^(1/2).
This is the phenomenon of time dilation.
The faster you run, the younger you look, to everyone but yourself.

I've looked into the XFCE variant of Mint. My impression was that live persistence is not really built into the system in the same way it is for MX17, for instance.

It seems a distro like MX17 (or Porteus) but just bare-bones doesn't exist!

So another attack vector. Does getting rid of an installed package via a distro's package handling tool (ie apt, pacman, rpm) remove everything that was ever installed? Windows de-installations are famous for leaving behind all sorts of crap.